WHITEPAPER: SharePoint Deployment on Windows Azure Virtual Machines

This is pretty cool. If you’re gonna stand up SharePoint, which is designed to reach the maximum number of people in your organization or customer base, why use in house hardware when you can just put it in Windows Azure’s virtual machines and pay as you go?

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 provides rich deployment flexibility, which can help organizations determine the right deployment scenarios to align with their business needs and objectives. Hosted and managed in the cloud, the Windows Azure Virtual Machines offering provides complete, reliable, and available infrastructure to support various on-demand application and database workloads, such as Microsoft SQL Server and SharePoint deployments.

While Windows Azure Virtual Machines support multiple workloads, this paper focuses on SharePoint deployments. Windows Azure Virtual Machines enable organizations to create and manage their SharePoint infrastructure quickly—provisioning and accessing nearly any host universally. It allows full control and management over processors, RAM, CPU ranges, and other resources of SharePoint virtual machines (VMs).

Windows Azure Virtual Machines mitigate the need for hardware, so organizations can turn attention from handling high upfront cost and complexity to building and managing infrastructure at scale. This means that they can innovate, experiment, and iterate in hours—as opposed to days and weeks with traditional deployments.

This paper is intended for IT professionals. Furthermore, technical decision makers, such as architects and system administrators, can use this information and the provided scenarios to plan and design a virtualized SharePoint infrastructure on Windows Azure.

This paper explains how organizations can set up and deploy SharePoint within Windows Azure Virtual Machines. It also discusses why this type of deployment can be beneficial to organizations of many sizes.